It would be more useful to describe what abilities one would have at a particular level, than the amount of grinding it takes to achieve it. Being able to solve Euler problems at all might be a useful indicator of being a certain level, but having done a lot of them doesn't seem directly important, and if it teaches certain skills, then we should look at those skills directly.
Chore Wars and EpicWin exist. (Haven't actually used ChoreWars. I used EpicWin for a while, I still technically do, but it's not as effective as I'd like.
Up until recently I'd have been highly supportive of this. A few days ago I read a counter argument, specifically to the gamification of education, which made the point that a) when you have extrinsic motivators, people are less likely to care about the things for instrinsic reasons, b) people tend to game the system rather than actually accomplish the thing you intended.
I don't know how true those statem...
This is an incredibly cornball idea, completely worthless for any naturally rational mind, which sounds like it was designed to help out irrational game-obsessed apes instead.
As an irrational game-obsessed ape, I wholeheartedly approve. Thumbs up.
I think a single common leveling scale isn't a useful idea. For instance, I'm not a salesman, and in the other popular context of "cold approaches", doing them would probably reduce the level of my marriage! A scale for each of a few dozen skills would be interesting, though.
Unless this sort of game b...
The ExRx table of strength standards has a level called "untrained," defined as "the minimum level of strength required to maintain a reasonable quality of life." Of course, when I started exercising, I was below this "minimum," but it took only a little bit of dedicated effort to get there. That's what I think "Level 1" should be like.
Social: be able to initiate a conversation with someone you've met and make plans to meet again.
Programming: be able to write a program with a for loop in some language (i.e. multiply the numbers from one to N.)
Discipline: be able to work for two hours without stopping.
Math: I'm not sure, because I'm so wrapped up in it that I don't have a good gauge of "minimum necessary," but perhaps, be able to prove Bayes' Theorem, or understand differentiation and integration on a more than mechanical level.
Endurance: be able to run for a mile without stopping or walking.
Memory: learn a short poem or passage by heart. (Maybe the Gettysburg Address, to be U.S.-centric but standard.)
Empiricism: find a question you REALLY don't know the answer to (and can't instantly google) and either design an experiment or read experimental studies until you have convincing evidence for one side or the other.
I think that for the reference class of humanity, the minimum amount of math that you need is the ability to consistently not get cheated out of money, and to be able to count without your fingers.
How consistently do we have to be able to do these?
I had a data entry job in the summer of 2002 when staying with family between years of college. After a day or two meeting people and finding out where the bathrooms were and getting started with the nominal data entry task I installed a macro recorder so I could factor out some of the human tedium by writing scripts to speed things up.
By the time I left the job 8 weeks later to go back to school I was teaching the "real employees" how to automate the boring parts of their own jobs and had them hire a friend who lived in the area to continue their macro lessons and to write the really "tricky" macros on the side (he'd upgraded the job to writing perl scripts within a few weeks).
Basically, if someone thinks they can be a "white collar worker" without any "algoracy" (cognate to literacy and numeracy), I suspect they are in the process of becoming economic road kill. The space of AI-hard jobs is steadily shrinking. Maybe some people can switch to "blue collar work" and learn to drive a tractor or pick strawberries instead? At least for a while? See, there's this thing called the singularity... but if you're here reading and commen...
I propose the following: anyone can create a merit badge (example to follow in self-reply), and it becomes official if it's seconded and thirded (and not downvoted below -2).
I don't see it working as an external ruleset, but perhaps people could more customarily announce their own leveling up, personal changes that added up to making a difference in some respect, like mastering a major skill, or fixing a mistaken policy (wrong belief) that had influence over you, or gaining a very useful insight.
I've added "make pancakes" as level-1 cooking. Pancakes are a "mix all ingredients and cook" recipe - so pretty straight-forward. I've added a link for a fairly explanatory recipe too.
It took me FOREVER to find http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/User:Cousin_it/Leveling from this page. Is there a way you can edit a link into the OP?
It might be a good idea to suggest alternative courses in each. For example, the Strength test is mostly a test of ability to access weightlifting equipment.
Suggestions (programming and finance already look fine to me):
There's plenty of physical fitness programs, such as Hundred Pushups that already effectively give you a leveling system AND an actual training program. I've found them quite useful, although I dropped them as soon as I stopped gaining levels easily.
It doesn't seem like it would be significantly harder to come up with alternatives: A NaNoWriMo training program where you produce 50 words/day for a week, then 100, until you're doing a novel in a month, for example.
I don't see any reason to have "generic" levels which combine physical fitness, probl...
I assume this isn't supposed to match up with anything else, right? Level 6 isn't reserved for superhumans?
An idea for level 2 programming (note, you must complete all of the below):
project euler has its own levels. Become "level 1" within Project Euler (which requires completing at least 25 project euler problems).
create an account on stackoverflow.com - gain at least 100 reputation solely from your answers to other people's questions.
start a blog based around your programming language/niche - and post at least four blog entries each month
I've added to the "memory" one: for short-term memory, using dual 1-back. No idea if I've made that one too hard....
I've also reduced the difficulty-level for the endurance one. I think "brisk walk 30min" is level 1. "run a mile" is at least level 2 as it requires some training to get there.
I like this and had a similar idea. It did not involve "leveles" but a learning tree, extremely similar to the one found at http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard . So you would not need "character classes" or "levels" but had an immediate view on the persons abilities. Based on the learning tree you can of course introduce "levels" as a branch of the learning tree and calculate "character classes" based on the proportion of the mastered skills.
Ultimately, this amounts to order all human knowledge int...
I've had this idea before too... but it seems to me like you need to have "character classes", instead of trying to make general "life levels". E.g., here'd be three levels for a character class of "statistician":
Level 1: given data (small enough sample size to calculate by calculator so you don't need a script), calculate basic summary statistics like the median, variance, etc., and be able to interpret them.
Level 2: pass quizzes to demonstrate understanding of basic fundamentals, like the difference between within-group and ...
I like this idea. Describing sufficiently granularr levels would also contribute to positive-feedback cycles, and to some extent even taskification (i.e. I know what I need to learn to level up).
Level 0 rationalist: You think that "Either possibility A must be or possibility B", means "A 50/50 chance either way".
Level 1 rationalist: You no longer think that.
1) Nah, probably not. Some common standards could be nice, but they should be specific, and once we start trying to do something LW-specific rather than some flavor of "general," karma ain't broke. Self-assigned standards might work if you can resist or somehow (like with another person) police gaming the system, but there's already systems for that.
2) The problem is inherent - putting things in this structure requires that you assign them relative worths. There may be an average answer, but average is wrong for a lot of people.
Sounds like fun, but it will take a lot of thought to come up with good leveling criteria. A naive set of criteria is just going to be boring or unproductive.
I think it's a great idea, and I would like to participate (I've thought about bringing up this idea, too). However, I think it would work best as an external (perhaps affiliated?) site.
We already have a common leveling scale set out by the universe itself: how many surviving children you have.
If you don't like that one, and prefer an easier proxy, we already have several: the most obvious being your annual income. (Corrected for education level if you prefer.)
If you don't like any of those, and you're looking for easier proxies still, I can only ask: Why? What exactly are you trying to accomplish with the scales you are trying to derive? Once you figure that out, it may be easier to decide what the scales should measure.
Level 0 rationalist: You think that "Either possibility A must be or possibility B", means "A 50/50 chance either way".
Level 1 rationalist: You no longer think that.
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?